Alternatives to Dreamweaver and Fireworks?

lemonade

lemonade

lemonade

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Just wondering what are the best alternatives you have come across to Dreamweaver and Fireworks? Preferably free software.

Are they both still popular apps for web designing, particularly Fireworks? would have thought Photoshop would be the preferred choice for web designers, and for coding using text editor.
 
When I moved to working freelance I started using Paint.Net and things like Notepad++.

I could'nt afford the license for the Macromedia products I used at my old firm and quite honestly, after a short transition period I really did'nt notice the difference.

Now using NetBeans IDE and still using Paint.NET, don't really need anything else.

I guess if your a proper web designer you can't beat something like Photoshop however, but most of my work is coding.
 
That's interesting. I worked on a HTML/CSS website for a mate few weeks ago, prior to that hadn't done a website for like 2 years, so installed Kompozer, which is supposed to be an alternative to Dreamweaver, but I didn't find any use for the extra feature it gave, so ended up just using a text editor and gimp/inkscape.

Not really ever used Dreamweaver properly, so wondering what is special about it to a web designer. Same with programmers like Fireworks.

I see a lot of jobs have the requirement of 'Dreamweaver', and some web designers and companies put it as a skill set.
 
That's not really that surpising. I think people who don't really "get" web layouting and programming assume Dreamweaver is the holy grail of web design.

It has its place sure, but its in no way essential nor should it be a prerequisite of a job imo.
 
I used to use Dreamweaver a lot back in the day for Web Design, but when I started out it was getting in the way of me actually learning. When I knew my HTML4 off the top of my head and had a good grasp of CSS1, I then bothered to learn the Dreamweaver interface and it helped ... somewhat.

For beginners to intermediate, there's nothing like using Notepad and Paint.Net to learn the core skills and practice them.
 
As a webdevloper all the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) offers is time saving benefits. I use Netbeans and dreamweaver (for different types of projects).

I like to have (not Need) good project management control, code highlighting and intelisence (for classes and functions that you make yourself as well)

It is definitely not necessary to have anything more than notepad, just makes things easier, I mean, i could code using just Notepad, but that would just make the process longer. lol
 
I use Eclipse and Notepad++ for coding, I tried to use notepad++ on a largish project i was attempting and found it was somewhat lacking in additional features so i moved to Eclipse. Although I couldn't trade in Photoshop for Paint.Net even something like Photoshop 7+ i could do with.

If its for freelance and you CAN afford to spend a few quid then maybe Microsoft's Expression Web program maybe worth a look Or Microsoft Web Developer Express Edition which is free.
 
I hand code... within Dreamweaver. For years I've used it as a glorified text editor. It has some really neat features and shortcuts that I could live without but employers have always provided it so who am I to complain? ;)

Just to name two things I like about Dreamweaver - the built in FTP client and the ability to select text and drag on to files in the folder view to create a link (I really struggle to remember path/filenames). Microsoft's Visual Web Developer is similar and free, however.

As for image editors... I've worked with a lot of top class designers that use Adobe Illustrator and I truly believe designers should be using vector packages, and that's what Fireworks is - a cut-down vector package especially made for web designers (rather than print designers). I really don't get the (over)use of Photoshop for design work because if you get something wrong you have to redraw it. Same goes for Paint.NET, which is highly regarded (up their with GIMP). I use Photoshop frequently for photo retouching and nothing comes close, but never for actual design work.
 
Notepad++ is pretty much the standard for GUI text editors. If you want something really powerful, though (and have plenty of patience), give Vim a try!

I made the switch earlier this year and haven't looked back. It's a godsend having my fully customized text editor available directly over SSH on all of the servers I work on.
 
Pen and Paper for layout
Notepad++ for HTML/CSS templates
Netbeans for sites
Paint.NET for graphics

I never really saw the point of Dreamweaver; it's two much of a halfway house between an IDE and a design tool. Photoshop is useful, but easily replaced by Paint.net for web stuff. Fireworks is hard to replace.
 
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Visual Studio for server side code/HTML
Notepad++ for javascript/CSS

At the end of the day, if you're going to call yourself a developer you should be hand coding all your HTML, so it doesn't really matter what IDE you use. It's just a preference of the feature set they each have.
 
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